Selim I

Selim I, called Yavuz, "the Grim" or "the Resolute", was sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520. In a reign of only eight years he defeated the Safavid shah of Iran and destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate, adding Syria, Egypt and the holy cities of Arabia to his realm. The empire grew by roughly 70 per cent, and its centre of gravity shifted from the Balkans towards the Arab Middle East.

Selim was born in Amasya in northern Anatolia, most probably in 1470, while his father, the future Bayezid II, was governor there; his grandfather was Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople. His mother is usually identified as Gülbahar, a concubine probably of Pontic Greek origin. The Turkish historian Feridun Emecen, following a sixteenth-century chronicler, has instead named Ayşe Hatun, a Dulkadir princess and another of Bayezid's consorts, but most recent accounts treat this as a confusion of the two women. In 1487 Selim was made governor of Trabzon on the Black Sea, a post he held for more than twenty years. His son, the future Suleiman the Magnificent, was born there in 1494.

Trabzon lay on the frontier with the new Safavid Empire of Shah Ismail I, who had made Twelver Shia Islam the state religion of Iran and was winning followers, known as Qizilbash, among the Turkmen tribes of Anatolia. Selim watched this threat closely, raided Safavid territory around Erzincan and Bayburt, and campaigned against the Georgian princes in 1508, carrying off large numbers of captives. His aggressive frontier policy contrasted with his father's caution.

By 1511 the ageing Bayezid II favoured Selim's elder brother Ahmed as his successor. That year a pro-Safavid uprising, the Şahkulu rebellion, swept western Anatolia, and the government's weak response strengthened Selim's case among the soldiers. He rebelled, was defeated by his father's army in Thrace and fled to Crimea, but returned with the backing of the janissaries, the elite infantry of the capital. In April 1512 Bayezid was forced to abdicate in his favour and died weeks later on his way into retirement; rumours that he was poisoned were never proved.

Selim then eliminated his rivals. He defeated Ahmed at Yenişehir in 1513 and had him executed, along with his brother Korkud and several nephews. Fratricide on accession had been an accepted Ottoman practice since Mehmed II, intended to prevent civil war, but Selim applied it with unusual thoroughness.

Selim regarded Shah Ismail as both a political rival and a heretic, and Ottoman scholars issued legal opinions declaring war on the Qizilbash lawful. Before and during the campaign of 1514, Selim's forces carried out a large-scale persecution of suspected Qizilbash sympathisers in Anatolia. Chroniclers put the number killed or imprisoned at around 40,000; the figure cannot be verified, but historians agree that the repression was severe.

On 23 August 1514 the two armies met at Chaldiran, north-west of Lake Urmia. Ottoman artillery and janissary musketeers broke the Safavid cavalry, and Ismail was wounded and fled. Selim entered the Safavid capital, Tabriz, in early September, but his troops refused to winter in Iran and he withdrew. Chaldiran nevertheless gave the Ottomans control of much of eastern Anatolia and helped fix a frontier with Iran that, after later wars, roughly survives as the border between Turkey and Iran. Selim also imposed a trade embargo on Iranian silk, damaging Ottoman silk weavers as well as the Safavids.

The Mamluk Sultanate, ruled from Cairo, controlled Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz. Suspecting a Mamluk–Safavid understanding, Selim marched south in 1516. On 24 August his army defeated the Mamluks at Marj Dabiq near Aleppo; the Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri died on the field, and the governor of Aleppo, Khair Bey, deserted to the Ottomans. Damascus surrendered in the autumn.

Selim then crossed the Sinai and on 22 January 1517 defeated the new sultan, Tuman Bay II, at Ridaniya outside Cairo. The city fell after days of street fighting, and Tuman Bay was captured and hanged at the Bab Zuwayla gate in April. The sharif of Mecca submitted, and Selim took the title "Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries", becoming protector of Mecca, Medina and the pilgrimage routes. Jerusalem also passed into Ottoman hands.

The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil III, a figurehead under the Mamluks, was taken to Istanbul. A story that he formally handed the caliphate to Selim appeared only in the eighteenth century, when it served Ottoman political needs; historians regard it as a later invention, although Ottoman sultans did increasingly present themselves as leaders of the Sunni world after 1517. Egypt became the empire's richest province and a main source of grain for the capital.

Selim had a reputation for severity: he executed several of his grand viziers, and a saying of the period wished on an enemy that he might become "a vizier of Selim". He was also well educated, wrote poetry in Persian under the pen name Selimi, and admired Alexander the Great. He reorganised the administration of the new provinces largely by keeping existing Mamluk structures under Ottoman governors, with Khair Bey ruling Egypt.

He was preparing a new campaign, probably westward, when he fell ill and died on 22 September 1520 near Çorlu in Thrace, aged about fifty. The cause is uncertain: contemporaries spoke of an infected skin abscess, and later writers suggested plague, cancer or poison. He was buried in Istanbul, where Suleiman built the Yavuz Selim Mosque in his memory.

Selim left his son a treasury, an army that had beaten both of its main Muslim rivals, and an empire that spanned the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Black Sea. The conquests made the Ottomans the leading Sunni power and set up four centuries of Ottoman rule over Egypt and the Arab lands, which lasted in some form until the First World War. The enmity he fostered with Safavid Iran shaped Ottoman wars and the Sunni–Shia divide in the region for generations, and the persecution of the Qizilbash is remembered bitterly by Turkey's Alevi community. In Turkish popular memory he remains a celebrated conqueror, and a third bridge over the Bosphorus, opened in 2016, was named after him.